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Students Trapped In School Elevator

(Published Thursday, Nov. 3, 2016)

Twice in less than one week, several Hartford public school students became trapped in the same elevator.

School district officials said the elevator at the Alfred E. Burr school is now back up and running and the students are fine, but parents are still concerned and wondering why notification wasn't made.

The first incident happened last Thursday when seven students between sixth and eighth grade, as well as a school security officer, were trapped for 45 minutes before Hartford firefighters freed them. One child was on crutches.

The same elevator stopped working again on Tuesday and five eighth-grade students got stuck with no adults present, school district officials said. One of those students was on crutches as well.

Hartford firefighters said they cleared the second incident within 12 minutes of arriving by shutting the elevator down to interrupt service. It restarted after that.

However, Hartford school officials refused to tell the NBC Connecticut Troubleshooters how long the students were trapped during the second elevator incident.

Her son’s classroom is in the basement, so he sometimes takes the elevator, Cespedes told the NBC Connecticut Troubleshooters.

"It concerns me a lot because I gotta be worrying about the child's well-being and making sure they're OK and if it's happened more than once, it's a kind of a caution thing for me," Jaquan Jackson, the father of Jaiden Ryans, told the NBC Connecticut Troubleshooters.

Jaiden Ryans, a fourth grader, said he wasn't aware of what happened and there was no announcement at school.

"I would've screamed and pressed an emergency button," said the 10-year-old, who has a cell phone but did not bring it to school in the day NBC Connecticut spoke with him.

"He'd freak out. I don't think he'd enjoy it at all," Jackson said.

NBC Connecticut reached out to the district spokesman, Pedro Zaras, who said by email, "the elevator is open, functional and has been checked by Kone for safety."

Kone is the elevator company, which is based out of Illinois.

Parents told NBC Connecticut they still want to know why they weren't told.

"That's a big concern because everyone should be notified if something like that happened, because I wouldn't know if it was him or not," Jaquan Jackson said.